The Travel Gods Must Be Crazy

by Sudha Mahalingam

  SUDHA MAHALINGAM

  THE TRAVEL GODS MUST BE CRAZY

  Wacky Encounters in Exotic Lands

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Introduction

  The ABC of Trekking at Sixty Plus

  Awed and Outwitted by Egypt’s Gifts

  Oktoberfest: The Goblet of Bacchus

  Time Travelling to Issyk-Kul

  Yazd: Gained in Translation

  The Barbed Beauty of Israel

  Bagan: Stepping into a Bioscope

  Thieves at the Equator

  Roman Holiday

  Riding with the King

  Mekong Diary

  ‘What in Heaven’s Name Brought You to Casablanca?’

  The Impossible Trail of Nikitin

  Travails of a Vegetarian Traveller

  Stumped in Paradise

  Toasting in Toledo

  Borneo: Raw, Rough and Ravishing

  Frozen in Norwegian Summer

  Stuck with the Buddha in Sichuan

  The Playful Ganga Mai

  Worm’s-Eye View from Palestine

  Tokyo: Perched between Temples and Tech

  Hidden Treasures in Moreh

  Shell-Shocked in Jordan

  Pushkar: Creation in All Forms

  Punctured Andalusian Dreams

  ‘Tranziting’ through the Czech Republic

  Teetering between Myth and Reality in Yingkiong

  On the Roof of the World

  From Ecstasy to Terror in Serengeti

  Skydiving at Sixty-Six

  Footnote

  On the Roof of the World

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE TRAVEL GODS MUST BE CRAZY

  Sudha Mahalingam juggles a full-time career in energy with extensive travel, travel-writing and photography. As an energy economist, she researches, consults and advises on energy security, and lectures at India’s premier institutions. Her work as full-time regulator of petroleum, energy member of the National Security Advisory Board, international trainer of regulators and visiting fellow in reputed international universities has taken her places and, sometimes, inveigled her off the map. Among other organizations, she has worked at the Centre for Policy Research and the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi, and has been senior fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi.

  Sudha has published extensively on energy and travel in leading publications, including The Hindu, Indian Express, National Geographic Traveller, Economic Times, Tribune and Frontline. She speaks frequently on exotic destinations at the India International Centre, Delhi, and has held three photo exhibitions in the national capital. Sudha chronicles her travel impressions on her website at www.footlooseindian.com.

  For Kapilan, my unrelenting (tor)mentor

  Introduction

  All That Glitters in Travel Spiel

  Putting one’s foot into one’s mouth might seem like an impossible feat of contortion requiring complex manoeuvring skills. How and when I acquired and honed these enviable skills is of less interest than the fact that I have managed to deploy them time and time again, during my peregrinations through sixty-five countries in the past quarter of a century. And the consequences have ranged from the embarrassing to the confounding, the costly to the inconvenient, and occasionally, to the downright dangerous.

  But how did I turn into that unwonted specimen—a middle-aged, middle-class mother of two from a conservative Tambrahm background travelling solo, long before solo travel became fashionable among Indian women?

  It all started with my dear husband (now, of forty years) refusing to foray out of his comfort zone—home and office—whatever the seductions of the beyond, whereas I happened to have just the opposite inclination. On those rare work trips abroad on which I accompanied him, he would invariably assign a local chaperone to show me around all the touristy places. I felt hopelessly shackled and unjustly denied. Soon I developed an irrational disdain for planned trips. From the gloomy depths of a quotidian existence, I secretly longed for the thrills of impromptu forays, the imagined surprises of unpredictability, the pleasures of recklessness. I developed a persistent itch to explore the exciting, exquisite and extraordinary world, which in my sights, was waiting out there. The itch would soon scale up to a full-blown eczema. It could no longer be left untreated.

  That was more than two decades ago. I set about looking for ‘legitimate’ reasons to venture out of my ‘discomfort’ zone. I ditched my stable but boring job in mainstream print journalism to foray into terra incognita, one that would, hopefully, open the doors to my imagined world of wonder.

  Serendipity led me in the direction of energy research, a sari-clad woman bumbling her way through seminar rooms full of smart pinstripes and black ties, poring over zigzagging charts and incomprehensible bar diagrams of NYMEX and Brent. My lexicon was filling up with mumbo jumbo—API index, sour crude, crackers, etc. Before I knew it, I was processing from one conference to the next, having morphed rather quickly into an energy expert.

  Soon, invitations began to pour in not just from Kochi or Kolkata, but also from organizers of road rallies and transnational motoring expeditions through petroleum-laden lands—Iran and Azerbaijan where gas wells are still worshipped in fire temples, through the Siberian wastelands where oil gurgles just beneath the ice, through Central Asian steppes once roamed by Genghis Khan’s golden horde, now criss-crossed by a welter of metal tubes. Driving in a motorcade of twenty cars ferrying four nationalities through four countries, I was shown wondrous pipelines through which ingenious Chinese engineers had coaxed Burmese oil and gas all the way from Sittwe to distant Yunnan.

  My perceived expertise on energy matters even bestowed on me the membership of the prestigious National Security Advisory Board, ostensibly to advise the Indian prime minister on energy-related issues. I also became full-time regulator of India’s petroleum industry. I was now on a hurtling gravy train that dropped me off at exotic destinations with dependable frequency. There was a year when I was invited to—hold your breath—eighteen international conferences.

  Being always in a hurry—there were PowerPoint presentations to be prepared, leave to be secured, family arrangements to be overseen—I had little time left to do serious homework on the destinations I was headed to. Dog-eared Lonely Planet guides of yesteryears were my only beacons, often blinking or blanking out altogether, with outdated information on shut-down pensions or eateries. Eventually, the Internet came along, promising a modicum of assurance, but its reliability levels were as yet untested. Which is why I landed up in the Czech Republic without a valid visa and was caught without yellow fever vaccination at Nairobi airport.

  It never occurred to me to simply go on holidays depicted on glossy brochures—to leisurely bask in the sun on golden beaches or sip pina coladas under picnic umbrellas. Virtually always on a shoestring budget, rushed for time, and with the destination determined by conference invites, my trips are eclectic and eccentric. With my penchant for the uncharted and unexplored, I even slid off the map whenever I could, and, more than once, slid off a plane to add some excitement when the terrain got too barren or dived into the ocean when the coast seemed predictable. Occasionally, I blundered into dangerous locations—and had a close escape with my life or freedom and, on occasion, my dignity.

  But, over time, my passion for travel has only gotten worse. It continues to singe and sear and is now imbued with a sense of urgency. Not only is there so much to see and do when I am not getting any younger, the hydra-headed monster called tourism is literally carpet-bombing every square inch of our cowering planet—threatening to reduce me to being a t
ourist rather than a traveller.

  Predictably, friends who insisted on tagging along with me on my journeys often shunned me like the plague afterwards. The boat journey up the Mekong River through four countries entailed considerable hardship and yielded no bragging rights, so to speak. As four of us friends sweated it out through sultry, smelly, crowded Vietnamese or Laotian villages and towns, decades-long friendships frayed and fell apart. The trek through the unforgiving jungles of Indonesian Borneo, ostensibly in search of the elusive orangutan, alienated my travel buddies forever thanks to the horrors it entailed.

  My friend L, whom I had dragged along to the Galápagos Islands, almost got us detained with her impromptu interview of the then Ecuadorian president, no less, during our chance encounter with him at Quito airport. On another occasion, we nearly got incarcerated in Jordan because my then teenage son had innocuously pocketed an empty cartridge. He has refused to travel with me since. RB, my friend for decades, not just shut me out of her life, but went on to systematically demolish any shred of respectability I might have had, by narrating to all and sundry our undignified quest for a hotel room in the Moroccan city of Fez where she caught me on camera, shinnying up a grimy wall like a lizard.

  The last two decades of unplanned travel have taught me one thing. The yonder one dreams about is seldom as glamorous as it is made out to be. The traveller’s is a tough life calling for grit and an ability to keep one’s cool in the most trying of circumstances. Add to those one’s own bunglings, bloomers and botch-ups in unfamiliar landscapes, and you get journeys that become unforgettable for the wrong reasons. But if you retain your sense of humour, it can be fun too, at least in retrospect.

  While my indulgent former employer, the well-regarded Frontline magazine, faithfully published my lengthy and photo-studded travelogues on strange, unheard-of locations, this book is a rare compilation of candid confessions and unedited impressions that never made it to the page. Other publications like The Hindu, Indian Express, Tribune, etc., too indulged me occasionally and parts of these also find their way into this book. This book would not have materialized without the help and support of Vijay Lokapally, my friend and former colleague, and the unstinting engagement and encouragement of my editor Richa Burman at Penguin Random House India.

  At the end of the day, I feel I am incredibly richer for the mosaic of experiences that travel has brought my way, even if they were of the weird and wacky kind. More than the fantasy landscapes I have zipped through and the fancy sights I have feasted my eyes upon, my life has been spiced up by the fascinating assortment of people I have met along the way and the farcical situations I have had to rescue myself from. In these pages, I offer the reader a flavour of what my travels have stirred up.

  The ABC of Trekking at Sixty Plus

  First, it was Suman, our travel agent in Kathmandu. When we were discussing travel plans on a phone call, and I told him we wanted three porters, one for each of us, he pierced my ego with a patronizing ‘Oh you’re tourists, not trekkers’. We were headed to Annapurna Base Camp (ABC) in Nepal—P, S and I. ABC is a good two-week trek for the fit and able-bodied, even tougher than the popular Everest Base Camp trek. We were not fit, nor were we seasoned trekkers. I did not bother to explain to Suman that it helps to have both hands available for trekking poles when all three of us are on the wrong side of sixty. From the sarcasm in his tone, I suspected he must be half our individual age.

  Next, it was unseen J sitting in distant California. He is the husband of my classmate S with whom my friendship goes back at least half a century. Somehow, J and I had never met. For him, I was an apparition from her previous life, embarking on some foolhardy venture before arthritis claimed me. Our frequent Skype conversations, which he might have overheard, did give him an inkling that something was afoot. But he was certain his sober wife of forty-five years would not be foolish enough to entertain any thoughts of joining her kooky friend on her flights of fancy. In his eyes, S, a responsible mother and a doting grandmother to boot, was incapable of doing something so foolhardy and outrageous. The sheer audacity of our project had lulled him into thinking we were not serious.

  Long after we had finalized the itinerary, paid the travel agent and squandered the rest of our hard-earned money on trekking gear and started gymming (me) and hiking (she) regularly, it dawned on J that we meant business. What an outlandish project! No, this can’t be allowed to go any further. He whipped up his iPad, consulted Google maps, factored in our daily trekking itinerary, crunched some numbers and voila, came up with the ‘exact’ number of feet (also metres in parentheses) we would be climbing up each day of the proposed trek. In a six-page detailed analysis of our proposed route, accompanied by an Excel spreadsheet, he showed us how it ranged from a net ascent of 5280.80 feet (1610 metres) on Day Two to 4231.2 feet (1290 metres) on Day Ten, with wide variations in-between. The calculations also showed a maximum net descent of –8888.8 feet (–2710 metres) on Day Twenty-three. Bungee-jumping into the Grand Canyon must seem easier in comparison. No, surely S won’t be able to handle this—what if she had a fall and broke her leg or got crippled with a severe back injury? Being a scientist, he waved his impressive spreadsheet before his wife, in the hope of dissuading her. She, in turn, waved it at me on Skype. I cut her off promptly, blaming it on poor digital connectivity in India.

  Lo, the imperial capital of Mustang province, nestles in a depression among the towering ranges of Dhaulagiri and Annapurna

  What J didn’t know, and we would find out the hard way, was that even Google Maps cannot accurately measure the exact ups and downs on the trek. J was spot on in computing the net ascent and descent on a single day, but he completely missed the myriad ups and downs within this undulating terrain where you go up a little and again down, and then up—repeatedly. J was surely way off the mark—it was much worse than he had predicted. But what he did predict seemed dire enough—he believed—for us to drop a project that, according to him, was not just crazy or dangerous, but also unwarranted. Little did he realize this was our swansong, our last-ditch effort to cling on to our imagined mastery over our bodies to do our bidding, our burning desire to do something that would give us bragging rights for the rest of our lives.

  S’s husband, and my own long-suffering spouse wisely refrained from prying into the finer details of our itinerary, having long given up on efforts to put sense into us. Mali just mumbled something about how I’d rue my decision and probably turn back halfway.

  Friends and family too weighed in with their unlimited advice and limited appreciation of our tenacity. I was alternately bullied, cajoled, condescended to. Someone even suggested he would teach me how to Photoshop my picture against the backdrop of the Annapurna range to get likes on Facebook! Meanwhile, a shopkeeper in California managed to scare S into buying a few expensive roundels of self-heating pads to be strapped to the stomach should temperatures on the trail plummet below zero. Her alarmed daughters, for their part, had loaded her luggage with toe gels and other fancy trekking stuff which would be the envy of Chris Bonington but utterly useless on this trek. They just added to our luggage and our poor porters ended up lugging these up and down.

  Dinesh, our guide on the trek, was somewhat taken aback when he first set eyes on the three of us at Kathmandu airport—three frumpy grannies in outrageous costumes borrowed from their granddaughters. But he was a suave lad, with a degree of sophistication that belied his youthful years. He quietly changed our original itinerary, which had been designed for a seasoned trekker, to one that would suit hobbling women in ill-fitting new shoes and with wheezing lungs. Seeing us painfully puffing our way up on day one, Dinesh would discreetly dispatch one porter ahead to reserve beds for us in the next teahouse so that we did not have to bivouac under a starry sky in leopard land. We would eventually drag ourselves to the assigned teahouse around teatime.

  Sand sculpted by vicious winds in Gilling, en route to Lo Manthang

  The porters, all just out of their tee
ns, told us how much we resembled their grandmothers, perhaps hoping to ingratiate themselves to us. We fumed silently and reserved our revenge for tipping day. Mercifully, the fellow trekkers, a motley lot from across the world, chose to ignore us. After all, they too were huffing and puffing up the slopes, too exhausted to notice the wrinkles on our faces. An occasional Indian trekker would solicitously ask, ‘Mataji, are you all right?’ He would hold my hand and gently lead me up a particularly difficult stretch, while his companion would grit his teeth and wonder loudly, ‘Ghar mein pota poti ke saath time bitaane ke bajaaye kyun kasht kar rahi ho?’ Had it been a pilgrimage destination like Kailash Mansarovar or Amarnath, we might have been forgiven for undertaking this trek, but this was ABC with nary a temple worth its name.

  But we donned our thickest skins, and plodded on gamely, unpatronized and unpatronizable. After eight days of negotiating very steep and seemingly never-ending jagged and crooked steps, stumbling over scree, rock and slippery snow, we finally reached the base of the mighty Annapurna. Fitter trekkers might have done it in five days, but we were in no hurry.

  When we reached our final destination, there were still fifteen minutes to go before sunrise. In the pale glow of dawn, shadowy forms shuffled towards the ridge that was already populated by a dense concentration of heads silhouetted against a greying sky. Annapurna and her magnificent siblings were still clothed in mist. In a few minutes, a shaft of gold pierced through the mist on the east to reveal the crown of Annapurna South. The shaft moved sensuously to caress the peaks one by one—Baraha Shikar, and then, the grandest of them all, Annapurna I—before moving west to its three younger siblings. Soon the shaft became a flood and the whole range was illuminated in a dazzle of molten gold. In the next half hour, it turned to silver. It was breathtaking, figuratively this time. All the huffing and puffing over the previous week became a mere blip in our memory.